There are very few recently launched pure open source projects these days (most are at least running donation-ware models or funded by corporate backers), none in the AI space that I'm aware of.
Well the real open source project is llama.cpp which Ollama basically wrapped and made a nice interface on top of. Now they do more things as they want to be a real business, but llama.cpp is now doing most things people wanted from something like ollama, like serving a REST API compatible with OpenAPI, downloading and managing local LLMs… while remaining an actual open source project without VC money as far as I know.
This is a new umbrella project for llama.cpp and whisper.cpp. The author, Georgi Gerganov, also announced he’s forming a company for the project as he raised money from Nat Friedman (CEO GitHub) and Daniel Gross (ex-YC AI, ex-Apple ML).
If any ollama folks are reading, it was a nice grift while it lasted, but as someone who actually cares about local-first, it is clear that these values were only ever a path to adoption and then monitization. Great job letting people think you were an actual community project and not a VC trying to recoup investment.
Ollama is a ycombinator startup, so I guess they have to find some roi at some point.[1]
I personally found Ollama to be an easy way to try out local LLMs and appreciate them for that (and I still use it to download small models on my laptop and phone (via termux)), but I've long switched to llama.cpp + llama-swap[2] on my dev desktop. I download whatever ggufs I want from hugging face and just do `git pull` and `cmake --build build --config Release` from my llama.cpp directory whenever I want to update.
I wonder how they plan to monetize their users. Doesn't sound promising.